CD Projekt Red explains why youre always poor in The Witcher 3

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The sprawling fantasy open-world of The Witcher 3 is filled to the gills with intrigue, monsters, an ever increasing list of free DLCs (including Wild Hunt's very own pig defending exploits) and enough sex scenes to make even Lars von Trier blush, but there's one thing Geralt's adventure isn't overflowing with: cash.

In the latest issue of Edge, the team sat down with senior games designer Damien Monnier and senior quest designer Pawel Sasko from CD Projekt RED to discuss Geralt of Rivia's final hunt and the conscious decision to make your work hard for those pennies.

Edge: The economy is tightly balanced to ensure you’re never too well off. How did you maintain that? Damien Monnier: It’s very difficult! We didn’t want Geralt to be this multimillionaire that just goes around killing monsters. Ultimately, he does it for money; we really wanted you to try to haggle over prices and get more, because you really need the money.
Pawel Sasko: In the books, Geralt was very poor; he was always struggling for money. It was one of the cool things we wanted to keep. There are a lot of funny stories about our economy. A QA tester came to us like, “I’m level ten, and I have 6,000 gold and have nothing to spend it on,” and we had to work out what happened. We’d left a door unlocked to a big villa – he’d robbed it and sold all these expensive swords.

The latest issue of Edge, with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, is out now. Download it here or subscribe to future issues.

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln

Dom has been a freelance journalist for many years, covering everything from video games to gaming peripherals. Dom has been playing games longer than he'd like to admit, but that hasn't stopped him amassing a small ego's worth of knowledge on all things Tekken, Yakuza and Assassin's Creed.